Audio City Guides – For Travellers

on 1/15/12 10:59 PM

Tested version: 1.0
Latest version: 1.2
Requires Android: from 2.1

USD 5.27 – Buy app

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Summary

It’s a small world after all? No way! The world is a big place and there’s so much to see, and being fortunate enough to visit some of the greatest cities in the world is a unique privilege people should savour. Travelling is certainly one of the greatest things a person can do in their lifetime.

Today’s featured application Audio City Guides presents audio guides for ten of the world’s greatest metropolises. The app can also help users prepare for their trips. Keep reading for more details!

Features & Use

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Test devices
-HTC Desire with 2.3.7 (Root and Custom ROM)
-Acer Iconia A500 with 3.2

The first thing you will see when opening up Audio City Guides is an overview of the guides for the cities that have already been downloaded. When you first start up the app this list will still be empty; in order to download a city hit the + symbol in the top left corner. The ten cities that can be stored locally are:

• Barcelona - 52MB
• Berlin - 210MB
• London - 84MB
• New York - 138MB
• Paris - 331MB
• Prague - 459MB
• Rome - 64MB
• St. Petersburg - 328MB
• Venice - 48MB
• Vienna - 293MB

The data is considerable—2 GB in total should you wish to download all ten cities. The packages for individual cities are pretty hefty: each contains images, texts and lots of audio files for various sites. There’s also an offline map. Files are saved to the SD card meaning the internal storage space won’t be surcharged.

Click on a city in order to see the introduction and the overview (which is set up in the same way for each city): a list of the sites, a map, images, texts and a search bar for audio files. Hit the ‘Route’ button in order to use Google Navigation—very useful indeed!

If the device’s GPS sensor is activated your current position will be displayed, making it easy to navigate an unknown environment.
The map is saved to the device, meaning it can be accessed offline—also a great feature, because you won’t need to draw from you flatrate when you’re abroad in order to consult it. It does mean that Google Street View isn’t available, however.

Bottom line:
Audio City Guides is a great application for anyone who is lucky enough to travel. The quality of both the images and the texts is top notch. The app (including the audio guide) can be used even when the app is running in the background or the display is switched off.

We can recommend it to users who enjoy travelling and are curious about a city’s history and culture.

Also: according to the developers, guides to more cities are in the works.

Screen & Controls

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Audio City Guides scores top marks as far as both controls and graphics go. The application is easy and intuitive to use, it’s set up very smartly and it’s packed with useful features and interesting information, without being overloaded. My one complaint: there’s no zoom function for enlarging images.

Audio City Guides is a universal application and runs beautifully on tablets.

Overall we take our hats off to the developers, they did a great job on this one.

Speed & Stability

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Audio City Guides performed very well throughout our test runs. It may take a bit of time to load on certain devices, though we found it to be very speedy on the Acer tablet.

Price/Performance Ratio

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Audio City Guides is available for 3,99€ from the Android Market and our very own AndroidPIT App Center. This application is sure to be a hit with travellers with a soft spot for – well, erm – travel, exploring and culture. We find the price to be reasonable in the sense that you are getting great value for your money: the application is very well made and it will spare you having to lug around numerous hardcopy editions of travel guides.

USD 5.27 – Buy app